Lands of Desire and Loss

Lands of Desire and Loss develops an interdisciplinary approach connecting the literary and geographical imagination which shape British perception and representation of colonial and postcolonial spaces. Through her readings of literary works belonging to the dawn of colonial enterprises (Walter Raleigh’s The Discoverie of Guiana and Shakespeare’s The Tempest), the heyday of the British Empire (H. Rider Haggard’s She and W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions) and the postcolonial consciousness refashioning old myths and cultural tropes (V.S. Naipaul’s A Way in the World), the author highlights the crucial role of ideology in narrative plots and literary metaphors concerning space. The imaginative focus of the book is El Dorado, a geographical and literary construction created and recreated at different times, shaped and reshaped in British colonial and postcolonial writing.

Nicoletta Brazzelli holds a PhD in English Studies. She graduated both in Human Geography and English Literature at the University of Milan, where she now teaches English Culture. Her research focuses on travel writing, exploration narratives, nineteenth-century romance, postcolonial fiction and contemporary literature. She has published on Mary Kingsley, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Falcon Scott, V.S Naipaul and Beryl Bainbridge.